Freedom to Tinker

Where do you find an attack on a registrar account in the following attack: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2022/03/09/attackers-exploit-fundamental… I can't find it.

> It can be used for storing value It can only do this for as long as ownership of a certain private key is valuable. Some keys have shown to hold value for ~10 years (those tied to the BTC ticker symbol), but some keys have gone from valuable to worthless pretty quick. The fact that you have to bet on holding the right kind of private key I think makes it pretty clear that blockchains do not, in fact, reliably store value. > transferring value in a decentralised way There are no longer any decentralized blockchains that also have significant value (ie. worth transferring). For instance, the figurehead known as Bitcoin has been centralized for a while [0]. [0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fo…

Great idea! Privacy and anonymity are becoming hot commodities ;) You should be aware code style is some times enough to de-anonymize a well know developer! When coding style survives compilation: De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/12/29/when-coding-style-survives-co…

Ed Felten's article on this from a couple of months ago provides an excellent analysis. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/06/28/european-authorities-fine-goo… "At this point, I need to put some of my cards on the table and admit that I know more about this topic, having worked on the FTC’s investigation which asked some of the same questions. But that investigation was confidential, for good reasons, and I will not violate that confidentiality. All I’ll say is that the FTC had the legal power to compel answers to factual questions about Google’s practices (and an obligation to keep the answers confidential) and, having conducted a thorough investigation, the FTC decided not to bring a case against Google."

> It would be amazing if they went back to typewriters as being 'unhackable' devices. Considerable amounts of money and expertise have been thrown at sound analysis, and it's used in a range of situations from telling what submarine is in your waters to knowing what a typist is typing. And eventually people put parallel ports on typewriters because typists are more expensive than a parallel port, at which point you've got a cumbersome but very hackable printer. Researchers recover typed text from audio recording: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7448976 Acoustic snooping: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/09/09/acoustic-snooping-typed-infor… And Germany was thinking of trying exactly this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10968316/Germ…

Yes, see my link to the BULLRUN program. There were quite a few follow-ups as well. [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/10/14/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-c… [2] https://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/how-the-nsa-can-break-trillio… [3] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/03/how-does-nsa-break… And so on and so forth. Also keep in mind that they are retaining a full take online-- storing all traffic on the internet. Even if it can't be decrypted in realtime, they can come back to it in, say 10 years, with all the advancements in brute forcing and potentially quantum computing available in 2027, to take a look at your 2017 activity. The emails you wrote, the websites you visited, all your chats, all your searches, saved forever.

Right, mining pools are an issue. If the hash power isn't sufficiently distributed then your guarantees go away. That is why some people are doing research in that area to discourage or eliminate mining pools. I read about most of this from the following draft textbook from Princeton https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/02/09/the-princeton-bitcoin-textboo…

Princeton prof ARVIND NARAYANAN - wrote an excellent introductory book on Bitcoin. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/the-princeton-bitcoin-…

You have a better technical background than me, so take this recommendation with a grain of salt, but I've found this textbook very useful: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/the-princeton-bitcoin-… I've only read the first few chapters, but it seems to avoid the obvious traps of inaccessibility and misleading simplification.

I would recommend you to block third-party cookies in browser settings, that's probably how you were tracked - the same cookie(s) were used on tradesy and some another site which could connect you to your email address. UPD A couple of relevant posts: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dreisman/cookies-that-give-you-away… https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-hidden-perils-of-coo… https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/how-cookies-can-be-used-…

There's a follow-up to this post here: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-web-privacy-problem-… And here's our open-source tool that we've been using to do all these privacy measurements: https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/ We'd love to see pull requests or just other people using our tool for new interesting findings.

The issue is more philosophical than practical. see: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/ Note that in this case, an iPhone is locked down enough in hardware and software to where it really doesn't matter if you can open the screws or not. Actually I don't own an iPhone, is there something you can gain by opening it up? Replacing battery or SD card or something?

I would like to know where you get your evidence that we are falling down some slippery slope where restrictions on home experiments in the physical sciences are getting stronger Stories like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411813 About programming I agree that it's more tenuous, but sites like https://freedom-to-tinker.com/ clearly are talking about something. I don't see why anyone would regulate programming. People who say things like this: "The FBI said that cyber crime is the agency's No. 3 priority but it will likely rise to No. 1 in a few years. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robert White said that criminals always find new ways to exploit victims and businesses, which keeps the U.S. at risk. "Given our connection to the Internet, and our infrastructure and everything being computerized, it also lends itself to possible cyber terrorism..."

Because of the ignorant, media-fueled misuse of "hacker", I have begun using the older term "tinker" again. As did Ed Felten for his well-established blog http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ .

Note that due process doesn't apply to extortion. Mike Freedman gets a ton of inaccurate nastygrams from copyright enforcers, but they don't care. They keep sending them. This situation may be evil, but it exists today and it generates significant revenue. (It doesn't seem to deter much infringement, though; I guess people think it won't happen to them.) http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/mfreed/inaccurate-copyright-enfo… Also, any P2P system that downloads a significant amount of extra data won't become popular anyway, since it will be slower than non-deniable P2P. Freenet suffered from this, since all the pirates switched to the more efficient BitTorrent.

Previous HN coverage of Vanish at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762631 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717736 Not much discussion, unfortunately. There's also a blog post at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ that tells the story in a narrative format.

The best overview of this mess is from Cory Doctorow, who notes that while the claims of fraud in this election are garbage, the voting machines, and especially overused Ballot-marking devices (BMDs), are also hugely problematic. Voting machines didn’t steal the election. But they’re a terrible technology. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-elec… And worst of all is ES&S' threats against folks who point out those legitimate flaws, e.g. SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group in NY. ESS voting machine company sends threats https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess-voting-machine-company-se… What we need is evidence-based elections: Evidence-Based Elections: Create a Meaningful Paper Trail, then Audit Andrew W. Appel* & Philip B. Stark* Georgetown Law Technology Review 2020 https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/4.2-p52… And though we have improving evidence for correct tabulations in the recent elections, many states still aren't doing a good job providing evidence for ballot eligibility or chain-of-custody. The best way to promote confidence in our democracy is to calmly stick to facts, not be swayed by politics, and work to make things better. For more on how we've done that in Colorado and elsewhere, see my page at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/

Are you aware that the "my homebrew crypto system is functionally equivalent to a one-time pad, and is therefore perfect" argument is so overused by cranks that it's considered a cliche among actual cryptographers? [1] https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/580823914340880384 [2] https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0215.html#snakeoil (#6) [3] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/03/25/be-wary-of-one-time-pads-and-… [4] http://maldr0id.blogspot.com/2015/05/crystalline-cipher-and-cryptograp… I don't even know how to respond anymore. You must be trolling. Key-stretching algorithms are better than your chain-of-hashes because each iteration of a key-stretcher is deliberately CPU and memory intensive, whereas hashes are designed to be fast and efficient. So whatever clever scheme you think you've come up with to turn a single letter into an adequate key using secret combinations of chained hashes -- congratulations... you're doing what a key-stretcher does, but badly, because your scheme is much easier to brute-force. Look, there are a lot of really subtle things that you need to be aware of when designing cryptosystems that even professional cryptographers get wrong sometimes, and exploiting these mistakes in a way that results in a complete break is way easier and more common than most people think. This is why "Don't roll your own crypto" is considered a best practice. Not because it isn't possible to come up with a simpler scheme.…

Thanks for these links, usually when talking about it not being decentralized the source is either Forbes or Business Insider. Let's see what your sources have in store. EDIT: [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03998 Good paper, lots of good research. Identifies that top pools do not change position too often. Shows also that system profits prefer higher pool sizes. However, fails to notice that pools are made of individual miners/groups and do not represenet single huge datacenters. Groups/individuals can often change pools, and this is not an uncommon practive. [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-... First thing to note is that this is 2013, when the bitcoin world was a lot more centralized (Only one major exchange, MT.Gox, much less visbiiltiy and credibility. I argue that more coverage results in a more decentralized system) Also, this is not really a decision of centralization, but feels akin to an UN meeting, where multiple actors discuss rationally the best course of action for their community, and then move in regards to that course. No one forced the community to follow their moves, but when they did, the results were better for the whole community. Of course, if they had not given advice from an authoritarian position, nobody might have listened. Yet, still Bitcoin would have survived, as explained by Buterin: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockch… [2]…

Everything we do in life relies on a trust system more or less. Reproducible build only guarantees integrity, not the trustworthiness of the code. > There is no way for anyone to know what all this code is doing, there is little way to verify updates and its simply untenable. Because few people have time to read source code. Take Django as an example. Big community, lots of contributors. Can we say we should trust the code because the number of eyes? Probably, but not always. Why? We can overlook and pretend the code is legitmate. Take Linux kernel or some of the crypto projects out there. A lot of unreadable old tricks made backdoor really easy. [1] is interesting because someone apparently made an authorized changeset to BitKeeper. Are you going to read JRE code to make sure no backdoor? Nah. Is there a solution? Nope and will never have a solution. The best one can do is using a DVCS to prevent unathorized changeset (provided every contributor does a sanity check for pulling in changeset) and trust the community. No machine can distinugish a good code from a bad code. Humans can't even tell unless raising a red flag. Sometimes change of project ownership can also introduce some uncertainty, but that is a rare case for major projects. I am pretty confident there are code in the Linux kernel no one has ever touched or ever read for years. [1]: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of…

There's a bunch of academic research in this area -- how to build an encrypted ballot box that lets you audit that your vote was counted correctly, but prevents anyone else from seeing what your vote was. However, a fundamental problem with any kind of online voting is that it doesn't prevent your vote from being coerced: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2006/12/12/erosion-secret-ballot/ The best known way to do that is to make you walk into a secure area, secretly make your vote on a piece of paper, and put it in a common ballot box. That's the system most countries already have! E-voting also fails to solve voter suppression problems -- how do you decide who gets a voting ID? Finally, this kind of thing just isn't needed right now. Is anybody claiming that fraudulent voting was a significant problem in this election, or in any recent US election? Where's the evidence? The current highly decentralized system is already pretty robust against widespread fraud (though slightly less so as electronic voting machines become more popular). There are far more important problems to solve, like voter suppression and the extreme polarization of politics.

"The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand... Based on the evidence we have, we can’t prove for certain that NSA is doing this. However, our proposed Diffie-Hellman break fits the known technical details about their large-scale decryption capabilities better than any competing explanation. For instance, the Snowden documents show that NSA’s VPN decryption infrastructure involves intercepting encrypted connections and passing certain data to supercomputers, which return the key. The design of the system goes to great lengths to collect particular data that would be necessary for an attack on Diffie-Hellman but not for alternative explanations, like a break in AES or other symmetric crypto. While the documents make it clear that NSA uses other attack techniques, like software and hardware “implants,” to break crypto on specific targets, these don’t explain the ability to passively eavesdrop on VPN traffic at a large scale." https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaki…

I may be wrong, but it's more than just a random feeling. I should also point out that I'm not suggesting that all data should always be released. And also I'll reiterate that it's not just 'randomwalker' I'm referring to here. I'm disappointed that the paper he's rebutting seems to be making the silly claim that 'it's safe' instead of 'it's a worthwhile risk'. The case I'm most familiar with is the Netflix Prize. I think I can safely say (in my semi-professional opinion) that a lot of good research was published as a result of Netflix's decision to release the data that they did: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=netflix I view these publications as a public good. It's possible the techniques described were previously known privately, but before the contest there was no description of them in the available literature. At the conclusion of the contest, Netflix briefly announced that they would have a second contest, which would involve the release of another data set. In large part as a result of the press coverage of randomwalker's work, this potential release was cancelled: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflix-cancels-netflix-prize-… It's disputable, but I feel this additional data set would have generated a similar number of good publications, inspired new research, spread knowledge, and offered a similar benefit to the public. It can be argued that preventing further data releases has prevented further harm to the public. But I think it's…

It's sorta up for debate. My understanding, which is tiny and very limited, is that you can think of the role of finance operators as "liquidity providers". They're the grease in the wheels of capitalism; by either providing access to capital (via loans, or investment) or by matching buyers with sellers. A classical example is you're a farmer that wants to hedge the risk that your crop will fail due to random weather events or that there will be such a glut in the market that you won't be able to sell your crop profitably. So, you enter a contract to sell your crop at a fixed rate long before harvest comes along. That's a future contract, and it's a kind of derivative. So, derivatives can be really socially useful instruments. They can act like certain kinds of insurance, or allow you to capture different dimensions of value on assets that you already own. However, and here's where the argument comes in, it's not clear that all kinds of derivatives provide socially useful forms of gambling. The prime example here is that of the collateralized debt obligation in which huge portions of the US mortgage market got sunk into. Mortgage backed securities are probably not in of themselves terrible ideas but the way CDOs were structured made it impossible to objectively value the risk behind the instrument. It's just not clear how a dip in the market might affect the value of your CDO tranche. It's actually an np-complete problem -…

I think some interesting commentary that was only touched on a bit by the EFF post can be found here http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/gizmodo-warrant-searching-j… (linked by parent). I think what may be the interesting question here is that the police may have taken far more information then would be necessary for evidence gathering, thus constituting unreasonable search and seisure. The EFF article also notes that the search warrant doesn't state a probable cause for why Chen should have been searched, and why specific materials should be searched in relation to the presumed crime (which they don't actually state). From what I gather, this could make the evidence they gather (if any) inadmissable in court. What's more, since the constitution guarantees freedom of the press if Chen is considered to be a member of the press that would likely make his 4th Amendment protections more stringent. The article points out that last year the 9th Circuit adopted pretty specific rules about what could be searched and those rules will likely have to be followed. Even if Chen committed a crime I think that this was indeed an over-reaction. The use of a broad search warrant could make all evidence gathered inadmissable in court and turn this into a circus of finger-pointing.

Well, it’s not like anyone sued a Dutch university for finding security vulnerabilities in their NFC transport card solution…NXP would never rush their implementation to market and then try to sue their way out of any vulnerabilities. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/07/15/transit-card-maker-sues-dutch…

It reminds me of Linux backdoor that also was made to look like a mistake (== replaced with =) [1]. [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of…

Yeah, often companies will make that kind of claim based on the fact they only pass around sha256 hashes of email addresses, which are trivially deanonymized. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/04/09/four-cents-to-deanonymize-com…

Indeed, a number of internet services and applications are vulnerable to BGP hijacking and interception attacks, including TLS/digital certificates, anonymity systems such as Tor, and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We discussed this in an earlier blog post on freedom to tinker: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/04/11/routing-attacks-on-internet-s… A more technical description of these attacks is available in our Communications of the ACM article: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/6/252822-securing-internet-applica…

I found the reaction to this surprising. When Security Researcher tell a company about a bug they've found, and the company reacts badly, this community is usually strongly in favor of the Security Researcher. The overworked corporate sysadmins don't get a lot of empathy. The assumption seems to be that that their software shouldn't have been vulnerable in the first place. Now here's a security researcher researching smuggling bugs into the Linux kernel. It probably should be secure, and probably should face scrutiny. People have tried snuggle bugs into it before.[0] So why is the opinion so strongly against the Security Researcher here? What's the big difference in principal? [0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of…